Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - US
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March 27, 2008
Wikipedia - Where do People Go After Visiting Wikipedia?
Wikipedia ranked as the 13th most visited website in the US last week, accounting for about 1 in every 200 US Internet visits. The website is hugely popular and with so much traffic going through the site, it is important to think about where all that traffic goes.
Last week, just over half (51%) of visits to Wikipedia came from Google.com. The second largest source of traffic was Yahoo! Search, accounting for 12% of visits. After Wikipedia, 10% of visits returned to Google, 3% went to MySpace and 1% went to the Internet Movie Database.
The following figures show downstream visits from Wikipedia. The first table shows the top 20 downstream sites last week and the bar chart shows the same report, but by industry, showing the share of US visits going to the various Hitwise categories from Wikipedia.
The really interesting thing I noticed was that most categories contain clear authority websites. Among Entertainment websites, IMDB and YouTube are authorities. Among Shopping and Classifieds it's Amazon and eBay. Among Music websites it's All Music Guide For Sports it's ESPN. For Finance it's Yahoo! Finance. For Health & Medical it's WebMD and United States National Library of Medicine.
A couple of categories lack one clear authority - instead containing multiple authorities. For example, among News and Media websites, .23% of visits from Wikipedia went to The New York Times, .20% to CNN.com and .18% to BBC News.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 08:45 AM
Posted to Reference
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» SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 28, 2008 from Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.... [Read More]
Tracked on March 28, 2008 05:35 PM
Comments
A couple of questions if possible:
1. Did people who went from Wikipedia to Google "returned" there or they got to Wikipedia through other channels and then continued to Google?
2. Is it possible to know if people followed the links from Wikipedia to the respective websites, or the moved to these website by other means (using they bookmarks, typing a URL, etc.).
It would be really interesting to know.
Thanks!
Posted by: Dima at March 27, 2008 09:36 PM
Dima, Thanks for your excellent questions.
We aren't tracking individuals so we can't say whether the people who came from Google returned to Google. We can say that 51% of visits came from Google and 10% of visits went to Google after. Whether these were the same people or not, I can't say.
From the data in our syndicated product we can't report whether people followed a link, typed in a URL or bookmarked a page. We are following the natural flow of internet traffic - no matter what method people use to navigate.
Hope that helps!
Best, Heather
Posted by: Heather Hopkins at March 28, 2008 06:29 AM
Not too surprising that your standard geeks and gamers would go back to "authority" sites after visiting Wikipedia.
I am a bit surprised that there weren't more visits to Google and other research / reference sites like del.icio.us, digg, online dictionaries, about.com, etc as I definitely use Wikipedia as stop #1 for any research task. I guess others use it for entertainment more than me....
Posted by: Andy at March 29, 2008 02:01 PM
You know what would be cool -- if there was a way to isolate the pattern of Google >> Wikipedia >> back to Google. If you could flesh out the people who returned to Google because they didn't find their answer in Wikipedia... now that would be powerful.
Posted by: Paul Burani, Clicksharp Marketing at March 31, 2008 08:23 AM
I always use Google when searching for info just about anything on the internet, because it provides better results. But i like Yahoo's services like Mail, Store, Answers etc.
Posted by: Smoothies at March 31, 2008 09:49 PM
Very interesting...but what specific steps can I take as a marketer to use this information..should I make sure that I advertise on PPC for NY Times? I'm not sure how this information helps, perhaps you can explain how this insight can prove useful to online marketers. thanks.
Posted by: peter at April 1, 2008 09:15 AM
Peter,
Thanks for your question. Depending on what industry you are in, it might be interesting to find out which are the authority websites in your category. Another takeaway might be just to think about the concept of traffic flow and how you can benefit from flow and become an authority website.
Traffic flow is an interesting concept. Jeff Bezos was once asked whether he saw libraries as competitors. Libraries are able to use the Amazon search engine. Bezos apparently believed that more traffic flowing through Amazon was good for his business, whether those flowing through the site were looking to buy books or not. People searching for books at libraries are into books and those are the people he wants on Amazon.com.
The discussion of traffic flow may spark thoughts among marketers about how they can be useful to their community. This should in turn increase traffic flow through a website, help to become an authority and in the end boost sales.
Other ideas are welcome. Or if the post was utterly useless, you can tell me that too! :)
Heather
Posted by: Heather Hopkins at April 2, 2008 07:03 AM
